Part Two: Execution – Hatclone.com: A Study in Hybrid Physical/Digital Virality
How I built this. I needed a mobile-friendly and good-looking static page with a stripe checkout link. I decided to incorporate QR-codes as a design element as you can see. This took a few hours of documentation reading, css tweaking, testing and api integrations. Ultimately the website is just a single button.
Next came sourcing and pricing. I had to order some preliminary hats from suppliers to assess the quality before selling to end customers. Quality assurance of the customized merchandise has been the single largest expenditure involved thus far. Hopefully it is one that I can amortize over the course of multiple projects.
Onto Marketing. There were the simple channels like Google Ads and Facebook Ads. But I wanted a channel more targeted to the qr-code concept. The strategy I chose was physical ads that incorporated qr-codes directly. This had the additional benefit of priming the audience to scan qr-codes.
The next question was which physical ads to use, and how to design them? The scenario had to be a stationary person scanning a stationary target.
The next task was to figure out the simplest possible copy and design. I basically just wanted a qr-code, and a bit of explanatory text. This didn't require glossy print, and could be done on cheap wheatpaste posters and stickers. This meant that an inexpensive guerilla marketing campaign would be possible.
So at this point I had figured out the engineering, the product, the pricing, and the marketing. I'll talk about launch next.
TLDR: I made hatclone.com. Buy QR code hats, your friends scan the code, they buy hats, cycle repeats.